Captain Schettino

"Listen Schettino, perhaps you have saved yourself from the sea, but I will make you look very bad. I will make you pay for this. Dammit, go back on board!"

Captain Francesco Schettino was the skipper of the Costa Concordia, and as five more bodies were reportedly found from the cruise ship accident, taking the death count to 11, there were reports that Coast Guardsmen on the island of Giglio had radioed him after he fled the ship, demanding that he return. 

He does look very bad, as the guardsmen warned him he would. 

While rescue workers, some of them scuba divers, kept searching for survivors or victims, there were threats being reported by the news media that the ship's fuel could leak, threatening the Tuscany Archipelago National Park, which encompasses seven islands that legend says were formed by seven jewels that fell from the tiara of Venus when she emerged from the Mediterranean Sea. 

Those islands include Giglio, and also Monte Cristo and Elba - famed for being where French Emperor Napolean was banished to in 1814 and lived for 300 days.

Unemployment

It is the only "free money" that depresses rather than uplifts. It's like a failure fee. For every week I fail, I get a stipend that pokes at me with a sharp edge. It's called unemployment insurance. If you called a radio station and won a thousand dollars, you'd be prim and upbeat. But get $1,200 a month from UI, and you want to crawl under a rock.

Contrary to the viewpoint of some out-of-the-cosmos conservatives, these stipends don't encourage you to fail again the following week. Quite the contrary: Every time you "earn" one, it's like the embodiment of the system, some malevolent beast, is grinning at you one more time. I think he looks rather like the Grinch.

So in this twisted, topsy-turvy, chilling economy in the Year of Our Lord 2012, I yet again sit on hold with UI in the District of Columbia, waiting for a human, because my benefit has been turned off. Frankly, the people there are fine once you get to one of them. They know the system and they know how to flick the "on" switch and they are thoughtful and professional. It's not the people that raise your blood pressure - it's the wait time on hold.

I think we were smarter as a society when we just got a busy signal. I don't think call waiting or waiting rooms or touch tone menus have helped us. I think they've only benefited the pharma companies that sell heart patient medications.